


A Question of Perspective

by Narya_Flame



Series: Summerland [3]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Earth Mysteries, Explicit Language, Gen, Government Agencies, Intelligence Operatives, Mentioned: Maglor, Mentioned: Vanimórë, Parallel Universes, Post-Canon, Stone Circles, Summerland 'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 16:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19834105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Narya_Flame/pseuds/Narya_Flame
Summary: Howard has mixed feelings about his newest recruit.  Martha, however, is about to surprise him.





	A Question of Perspective

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spiced_Wine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spiced_Wine/gifts).
  * Inspired by [~ Night of Masks ~](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999981) by [Spiced_Wine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spiced_Wine/pseuds/Spiced_Wine). 



> This won't make a lot of sense if you haven't at least read [Summerland](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15795351/chapters/36757947) and [Night of Masks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999981).

Howard J. Wainwright was a man accustomed to the unusual. Sometimes he was involved in making it happen. More frequently, it fell to him to make others believe that it _hadn't_ happened.

He was not, however, accustomed to hearing wild shrieks of triumph from the print room at half past nine on a Wednesday evening.

From the desk across the room, his deputy, Sally, raised a pencilled eyebrow. 

“Martha,” they sighed in unison. 

Howard got to his feet.

Their newest recruit came with the highest praise from the British Secret Intelligence Service, who spoke of her resourcefulness, her creative thinking, and her readiness for a new challenge. “A unique skillset,” he'd been assured by his London counterpart. “Invaluable. A perfect fit for your team.”

Howard wasn't entirely sure what he'd expected when Martha Painswick walked through his door for an interview. He'd seen photographs, of course, so he knew what she looked like – black curly hair, mahogany skin, startling green eyes – and he knew her background – oil money, a childhood spent flitting between Scotland and Russia and Scandinavia and the Middle-east. He knew about her Cambridge mathematics degree and her rapid rise through the ranks of MI6. Even so, he hadn't been prepared for her, this outwardly cheerful woman whose sharp gaze made him feel like _he_ was the one being interviewed – and whose brain was liable shoot off on six bewildering tangents at once. He knew Sally found it exasperating. To him it was amusing, even impressive – Martha's racing thoughts had a way of plaiting themselves back together in a pattern none of the others had got halfway to imagining yet. Right now, though, he was in the middle of figuring out how Mr. Lowry had picked up a tail in Vermont, and what his team should do in response. He did not need distracting. There was endearing eccentricity, and then there was... _this._

When he opened the door his eyebrows flew up towards his hairline. The print room was in disarray. Copiers and cabinets had been shoved back against the wall. The door of the stationery cupboard swung ajar. Martha was on her hands and knees in the middle of the floor, topknot askew, a red ball point pen stuck through its middle in a fruitless attempt to keep it in place. Her stockings were laddered and her suit jacket was flung carelessly over one of the printers. She knelt on top of an array of A3 printouts covered in thin, jagged outlines – national borders, he realised, seeing that the pages were arranged into two-thirds of a world map. 

Martha hadn't even lifted her head as he entered. She was circling various locations on the map and linking them with arrows drawn in a fat blue marker, occasionally glancing at a battered pamphlet she held in one hand, or referring to the case file placed next to her on the floor. 

Lucien Steele's case file, to be exact. Which she should not have access to. 

Strictly, she was not supposed to know about Lucien Steele at all.

“Toronto,” she muttered, sitting up and looking around. “Toronto, Toronto, where the fuck is Toronto...aha!” She tuggged a couple more sheets out from the pile by the toner cupboard and fitted them into place.

Howard pinched the bridge of his nose. “Martha...”

“One second, Howard.”

This was another thing. No other member of his team – not Rob, not Arnold, not even Sally – would even dream of keeping him waiting.

Martha circled a couple of points in the northern reaches of America, then sat back, grinning. “I knew it. I _knew_ it.” She looked up, green eyes shining. “OK, I'm done.”

Howard resisted the temptation to tell her yes, she was done, and throw her straight to Sally. “Done with what, exactly?”

She gestured to her patchwork map. 

“I see.” He didn't. He pointed at Mr. Steele's case file. “Where did you get that?”

Martha tilted her head. “You have access to my records, Howard. You know what I can do.”

He did. All too well. “Listen, Martha, maverick agents are all very well in movies -”

“New tailor?”

“Excuse me?”

Martha waved a hand at his suit. “Do you have a new tailor?”

“Well.” He adjusted his jacket – identical, he'd thought, to the ones he usually wore – and looked at her curiously. “Yes, now that you mention it. How -?”

“The buttonholes at your cuffs are usually wider than that. Only by a couple of millimetres – I suppose it makes them easier to fasten. Your left hand is still a little clumsy, isn't it, after the incident in Marrakesh? But your new tailor doesn't know that, and you never thought to tell him because your old tailor knew what you liked.” She looked him over again and smiled. “It's a nice suit, though. The wool is better quality.”

Howard exhaled and sat himself down on a chair that wasn't covered in paper or other detritus. “Alright, Martha. Go ahead and explain all of this.”

“OK. So. Reykjavik.” She tapped a circled city on her map. “Salisbury.” Another. “Alice Springs. Osoyoos. Dubrovnik. Stornoway. Cork. He jumps around between these places – and others, lots of others – like...well, you've said yourself. Like he can teleport.”

Howard didn't need to ask to whom she referred, and didn't want to know how she'd heard those conversations. “Yes.”

“And I started to wonder – what if he can?”

Howard blinked. 

“Not unaided,” Martha continued. “Obviously that would take power of a kind that's been gone from this world for thousands of years.”

“Obviously,” Howard echoed. He felt as though he'd been untethered from something important, and wasn't quite sure where he might drift off to.

“Although...” She tapped the lid of her marker against her teeth. “Hmm. ' _Eight, and eight, and other eight...how many miles to Babylon?_ '” 

Above them, the strip lighting flickered.

“Martha?” Howard prompted. “The map.” 

“Right. Yes.” She traced a finger between Brittany, Mexico and Greenland. “All of these places where we lose him, and then pick him up again after he's been gone for months – they're all what I call thin places.”

“What does that mean?”

“There's something about them.” She shrugged. “Old power. I suppose you might call it magic. History, memory, all still alive.” She smiled, and placed a hand on her chest. “To a lot of people like me, they're sacred.”

Howard knew Martha was a practising Wiccan. It was the kind of thing he made it his business to know about his team.

“Some of them are natural, some of them are man-made,” she continued. “Stone circles, for example – no-one really knows what they were built for, but there are plenty of legends that talk about them being used as portals.”

“Portals?” He shook his head, beginning to lose patience again. “What the fuck do you mean, portals?” 

“Exactly what I said. Some people believe they can still be used to travel. Mentally. Spiritually.” Her smile grew mischievous. “Physically.”

“Right.” 

“Only on very rare occasions.” She sat back and crossed one leg over the other. “Come on, Howard, you must have heard _some_ of it. Folk songs about beautiful young people who go into the stones, and then come back to find their friends and family are long since dead.” Her voice, with its strange hybrid accent, echoed through the room. “It's not always stones, of course. Sometimes it's the roots of a tree, or a witch's cave, or getting lost in the woods. You see the motif in fairy tales – The Elf-Child's Godmother, Rip Van Winkle, even Sleeping Beauty – all the way through to contemporary science fiction. It's in artwork, rock music, even Romantic poetry, because somewhere in here -” she laid one hand over her breast again “- we know it's the truth.”

Howard nodded slowly. A snatch of verse drifted through his mind, learned at school and long forgotten.

_I saw pale kings and princes too,  
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all..._

He knew better than to dismiss something because it sounded impossible. Thirty years ago he'd have called the very existence of Lucien Steele – and Mark Lowry – impossible. “So he's using them to move from place to place?”

“Indirectly, yes. I think _he_ uses them that way.” She grinned. “But I don't think Neolithic men built Stonehenge so they could hop up and visit their cousins on the Isle of Lewis. A lot of the evidence – what there is of it – points to these places being doorways.” Almost reverently, she stroked the outline of a small Scottish island. “Doorways into other worlds.”

Howard leaned back in his chair. “You're telling me that Lucien Steele is an alien.”

“I think it's entirely possible that he doesn't originate from this reality, yes. I think he uses these portals – thin places, earth mysteries, call them what you like – to get back to his own plane of existence.” She flipped one of the sheets over and tapped it. “And if he wants to come back and he needs to be in another place, he just walks through a different door.”

Well, it made as much sense as cloning, or AI, both of which had been quietly bandied about as theories through the years. “But if all of these towns and cities are portals -”

“Not the cities themselves,” she interrupted. “Or not always. But the places around them, yes.”

“Then why aren't people wandering into them and disappearing all the time? Stonehenge, for crying out loud...how many tourists go gallivanting all over it every day of the year?”

“I think you have to ask for it to happen – and know _how_ to ask. Or be very unlucky.” Her green eyes softened. “Well. Or lucky. Depending on your point of view.”

Howard wondered whether Martha would consider herself lucky or unlucky if she fell out of this world and into another. “I still don't understand why you had to do this in the print room – and, I might add, half-destroy it in the process.”

“I had to be sure. I've checked them all, now. Every time he vanished, every time he reappeared. They're all near these ancient, powerful places. Every single one.”

“And you couldn't have done that on a smaller map? At your desk?”

She shook her head, matter-of-fact. “It's a question of perspective. I see more clearly when I'm looking at something that's larger than I am.”

He didn't know what to say to that.

“Howard, I want onto this case.” Her eyes hardened, and she laid a hand over Mr. Steele's file, almost protective. “You _need_ me on this case.”

He sighed. It wasn't a good precedent to set – staff picking their assignments like kids choosing toys in a store. But he'd known for a long time that Lucien Steele was no ordinary human being. That seemed to rattle Martha far less than it did, say, Sally – or even Hal, who had been watching Mr. Lowry's house in Venice. “Am I going to regret this?”

“At least once or twice.” Martha smiled. “But it'll be worth it.”

She was, Howard suspected, most probably right.


End file.
